DC: Woman Sentenced in Elaborate Stalking

DC: Woman Sentenced in Elaborate Stalking

Woman Sentenced in Elaborate Stalking

Scott McCabe
August 31, 2011
A District woman was sentenced to more than 4 1/2 years behind bars for stalking a woman she had never met, threatening her life and setting up an elaborate scheme to have the victim arrested.
Prosecutors said they are not entirely clear why 43-year-old Joy Whylie chose to threaten and make life miserable for her target, but it appears Whylie mistakenly believed the woman got her fired.
At sentencing Wednesday, D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert I. Richter said Whylie has evil in her heart and engaged in a “carefully planned” method of “vindictive” harassment. She was found guilty in July on 19 counts of felony stalking, felony contempt and second-degree identity theft.
According to charging documents, Whylie and her husband and the victim had worked at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington in Northwest Washington. Whylie was fired in 2005, in part because of making harassing phone calls to her husband, prosecutors said.
In 2006, after Whylie and her husband split up, she began calling and threatening her husband at the facility — sometimes more than 100 times in a single shift.
At times she turned her focus to other employees at the workplace, on suspicions that they were romantically involved with her ex-husband or they were close friends of his.
In 2009, the victim began working at the facility and in July 2010, Whylie began to direct a “deliberate, vicious campaign” against the victim even though she had never met her, prosecutors said.
In one day, Whylie called the woman 300 times at work with threats to kidnap and hurt the woman, prosecutors said.
Whylie obtained the woman’s cell phone number and began calling her in the middle of the night, telling her that she was outside and was going to blow up her house.
Whylie continued her threats even after she was arrested for stalking, prosecutors said.
“This is war,” Whylie allegedly told the victim. “You think it’s over, I’m going to [mess] you up.”
She filed false police reports about the woman, and set up a sophisticated plot that resulted in the wrongful arrest of the victim.
Whylie made it appear that the victim was calling and harassing the victim’s estranged stepmother, a violation of a mutual protective order that the victim obtained relating to the probate will of her father who died in early 2011.
This conduct eventually resulted in a criminal warrant being wrongfully issued for the victim in another state on alleged violations of that protective order.